HMS Ark Royal was launched in 1937. The largest ship in the fleet at the time.When war broke out Ark Royal was the ship the German Fleet feared the most and within two days the German propaganda machine came into it's own, claiming they had sunk her in the North Atlantic, only for her to pop up in the North Sea.. Thus began a game of cat and mouse. Every time the Germans sunk a british carrier they either claimed or honestly believed they had sunk the Ark. There are at least 12 known occassions where the claim of "We sunk the Ark" was made but again and again the Ark popped up somewhere else. Why the Germans believed their High Command is beyond me.The Ark Royal saw service on Operations in Norway, in the hunt for the Graf Spee, the Raid on the Bismark and the Malta Convoys and suffered so many near misses that she became known as the "Lucky Ship" however her luck finally ran out on November 13th 1941 a few miles off the coast of Gibraltar when she was hit by a torpedo from U-Boat U81.The Ark remained afloat though listing badly for another day allowing the rescue of those aboard. She rolled over and went to the bottom on the 14th November. Of a crew of 1488 only one man was killed.

HMS Dreadnought, an 18,110-ton battleship built at Portsmouth Dockyard, England, represented one of the most notable design transformations of the armoured warship era. Her "all-big-gun" main battery of ten twelve-inch guns, steam turbine power-plant and 21-knot maximum speed so thoroughly eclipsed earlier types that subsequent battleships were commonly known as "dreadnoughts", and the previous ones disparaged as "pre-dreadnoughts". The swiftness of her construction was equally remarkable. Laid down in October 1905, she was launched in February 1906, after only four months on the ways. Dreadnought was commissioned for trials a year after her keel was laid and was completed in December 1906. Her building, trials and early service were closely watched by the World's naval authorities, including the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence.The new battleship served as Flagship of the Home Fleet in 1907-1912 and remained part of that fleet thereafter. Dreadnought served with the 4th Battle Squadron in the North Sea during the first two years of World War I. On 18 March 1915, while so employed, she rammed and sank the German Submarine U-29. From May 1916, Dreadnought was flagship of the 3rd Battle Squadron, based on the Thames to counter the threat of bombardment by German battlecruisers. Placed in reserve in 1919, the once-revolutionary warship was sold for scrapping in 1922.